The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs where each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. However, these advances have increased the complexity of processing and manufacturing ICs and, for these advances to be realized, similar developments in IC processing and manufacturing are needed.
In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometry size (i.e., the smallest component (or line) that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. This scaling down process generally provides benefits by increasing production efficiency and lowering associated costs. Such scaling-down also produces a relatively high power dissipation value, which may be addressed by using low power dissipation devices such as complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) devices.
A substantial number of layout dependent effects (LDE) rapidly occur along with the scaling of CMOS devices due to smaller geometries and increasing number of strain engineering methods for improving transistor performances. Many layout practices are being taken in the industry to mitigate the layout dependent effects, preserve transistor matching, and provide more consistent transistor performances with respect to SPICE modeling. However, the methods known to the inventors for mitigating layout dependent effects incur an increase in layout area.